Wednesday, August 5, 2009

there is this rather famous place to get gelato in rome called giolitti.

it is rather nutty chaos inside. first you cue up to the cashier to pay for your small, medium, or large gelato. then you weave, shuffle, nudge, etc, etc. toward the two guys scooping out the gelato.

there are a lot of flavors.

the inside of giolitti reminds me of the chaos on the trading floor. perhaps, my perspective is influenced by michael lewis' liar's poker at the moment....it is the book i'm reading at the moment. or if you live in the sf bay area, the chaos reminds me of trying to get on/off the 30 stockton bus when you are near the north beach and chinatown borders.

i think you can get a sense of what i mean by the chaos inside.

it doesn't matter if you are german, english, italian, american, japanese, chinese, etc. etc., everyone participates in the chaotic craziness inside giolitti. yet, it was a spanish guy that pointed to me as being next when the gelato guy tried to help him first. i think he took pity on me because i was so short, i wasn't doing any shoving, and was doing a lot of studious avoidance of the elbows flying from the large german women. folks could barely see me above the glass. you know, that is probably one of the reasons why i've been getting such good service. i think folks see me and my small self (and by myself no less) and they are like "oh we need to take care of her."

this is probably the only time in my life that i've actually been ok with this.

anyway, the flavors i chose were zabaglione (quickly becoming my favorite gelato flavor btw), caffe, and tiramisu. naturally, when the guy asked if i wanted crema, i said "si"....so i got whipped cream too!

it was quite tasty. yet, not so amazingly tasty that i'm willing to brave the craziness that is giolitti once more. i think once is enough. i also took it as a sign from the universe when i had licked through about half of my cone before it a good portion of it plopped down the front of my dress. sigh. it wasn't exactly what i had planned for cooling myself down. thankfully, my hotel is pretty close to giolitti so i was able to change into clean clothes quickly. i definitely learned that gelato on a cone can be quite a messy affair.